>> coming up, isabel wilkerson presents the history of the great migration when approximately 6 million african-americans migrated to northern and western states from the south from 1915-they geothe the. retells the many reasons people had for leaving the south, the difficult journey that many in toward the man and the geographical shift in population due to migration. she discusses her book for an hour into minutes.

>> that you so much. i am just giddy with all of the wonderful reviews that the book has received. i have waited 15 years for this moment. that is a very long time. i am honored and humbled to be here. i have spent so long steeped in the history of the great migration. for a while i was stuck in 1947 and thought i would never get out. for the record, just to be able to clarify what it is that the book is about the great migration was the biggest under reported story of the 20th century. it started in 1915 and did not end until the 1970's. all along the way people were taking, it must be over. in the world war one, it's done. in the world war ii, it's done.

it carried away some 6 million african americans to all points north and west to escape the southern caste system known as jim crow and search for the warmth of the other sons. an unrecognized immigration within the borders of our own country. fast, leaderless, the first step the nation's servant class ever took without asking. i spent so many years studying this that it is so fitting that i am here in georgia in atlanta of all places giving my first public talks about the book that has taken so much of my adult life. i came for reasons that were unrelated to the book. i later realized that i needed to be here. i did not know that i needed to be here, but i do. i needed to be able to see roses blooming in january. i needed to see crape myrtles in june the last forever.

i needed to be able to see the indescribable beautiful bloom in january and understand what the people left to understand the great sacrifices they made by moving to the north and west. this book was meant to be, and i could not rest until it was completed. there are many, many people who thought it would never be done. ever since this world and has begun there have been so many people who said, you know, i wonder if you ever will finish this. chat hope that you would and believed he might, but i just was not certain. i am so delighted and may be more relieved to be able to stand here and say that it is done. the review has been astounding. i am so grateful for that to a grateful for the response, but i am more grateful that my mother is here to see this day.

[applauding] >> it is so emotional for me to be here because my roots run deep in georgia. a very deep, deeper than most people who live here because you finally -- hardly ever find someone who is actually from atlanta. my great-grandmother rep in murietta. my grandmother drop in murietta, and she was a master gardener. when i got here to georgia something took over me. i could never grow anything anywhere before i got here. i could not grow anything that grows like weeds somewhere else. something inside me just took over. she used to grow american beauty roses the size of saucers' the people wanted to buy for a

dollar apiece back in the 30's and 40's, which was astounding. when i got here i had this inexplicable alerts to start digging in the soil. i have planted almost every quarter range of my house in the highland as a result of this. i can even grow the most difficult things, which apparently people say you have to plan five in order to get one. some my grandmother has come through to me here. this is a special spiritual place for me, and it was the only place that i could have written this book. i started the book in the north by talking to over 1200 people. i stopped counting after 1200, people who had migrated from the south to the north, to york, chicago, and los angeles. i met them there and all sorts of places.

i had gotten this bad exile perspective of the south. i got this perspective of the hurt, grieve, embittered, turning once back on the perspective. i needed to be here in order to be able to see what they left. by living here it gave me a sense of the enormity of the sacrifice that they made by leaving all that they knew and the people in the family, the soil, the land, the plan, the things that made them southern, to leave of that for a place that never seen and hope for something better. and it is also here in georgia decades before i was born that the seeds of this book about the great migration were sown. i want to tell you a little bit about that. a very different place from the time when my uncle, my mother's big brother, left georgia, the first in my immediate family or lineage to do so in the middle of a bleak era in american

history. it was a depression, and jim crow was the law of the land in the south. let me share with you exactly what that felt like and why it was a tragedy for everyone, black and white. these are the facts of life. from the 1890's to the 1960's in the american south it is hard to believe no, but these are the facts of their lives. we are not talking about slavery. we are talking about a caste system that was enforced during a lifetime of many americans still alive today during a lifetime of many people in the room with us tonight. there were days when whites could go to amusement parks and days when blacks could. there were white elevators meaning that freight elevators in the back right here in atlanta. white ambulances and black ambulances to ferry the sec.

white hearses and by curses for those who did not survive whatever was or with them. colored waiting rooms in any conceivable place that a person might have to do something. it described a new segregated bus station that had just gone up in jacksonville florida. it had two of everything, including to segregated cocktail land is. less the races brush elbows over a martini. there was, believe it or not, a colored window at the post office. there were white and colored telephone booths in oklahoma. we don't even consider them to be the south, but by many respects it actually is. white and colored people went to separate windows to get their

license plates. separate teller's made their deposits at the first national bank here in atlanta. there were taxicabs for colored people and taxicabs for white people. jacksonville, birmingham, atlanta, and the entire state of mississippi. colored people had to be off the streets and out of the city limits by 8:00 p.m. in palm beach and miami beach to read it was against the law for a colored person and a white person to play checkers together in birmingham. at saloon's here in atlanta of the bars were segregated. the city of love even that resulting in wide only and colored only saloons. cowhand mississippi and and one

north carolina court house there was even a white bible and the black bible. what this meant was that people who might have gotten along famously had it not been for the color of their skin and never got the chance to know one another, to truly know one another. one of the south's greatest resources, its people, and particularly the black people whose forebears had helped build the south did not get to be their fullest cells. my mother who grew up in round georgia once said that there was a really nice white lady who brought laundry to my grandmother. they used to have a wonderful time, a great time talking with my grandmother. they got along so well that they might have been the best of friends and another time and place. the caste system and jim-crow men that they both knew that

they could only take it so far. they are both dead. it is too late. what a shame and lost to both of them. you think of it, millions of other people that lost out on getting to know one another. a lesson to all of us to not let that be a barrier. my uncle, who are mentioned earlier planted the seeds for this book long before i was born. he was a teenager working for the head of an insurance company in round georgia. he drove the men around in his big car and ran errands for him. it was a good job, believed to be a good job for a black teenager. he spent many hours driving to miami for his business trips and saw comfortable and was at ease. one day he was cleaning up the man's office and opened the drawer. in it he saw fabric and unfurl

that. it was a white robes and head. he went home that night and told his parents and little sister that he was leaving georgia, would go to detroit and work for chrysler like a cousin. years later my mother just out of college would board the silver comet to washington d.c. where she would get a job and later become a teacher. she would meet and marry a tuskegee airmen from petersburg virginia who had migrated to washington. that is where i commend. i would not be standing here today if it were not for the great migration. a classic american story. all of us in some way or another are defended from people, someone in our past to take a great leap of faith to leave the place, the only place they had never known whether it was

coming across the atlantic -- atlantic or across the pacific ocean with the rio grande in hopes for something better, maybe not for themselves, but their children. it is that amalgamation, that coming together of multiple people who might have never met otherwise that created america as we know it. many of our forebears would never have met if you have not made that leap of faith. in some days -- ways that is what this book is about. my parents would not have met if it were not for this great migration to the majority of african americans that he might meet our actually descended from people who did this very thing, migrated from the south to the north. in fact, many of the people that you might meet here in the south have relatives in a very particular place which can be very, very much predicted, relatives in the north or west because the migration was so beautifully predictable and

organized around the train lines and bus lines and the group's system that took them there. so we all have so much more in common than we have been led to believe. the great migration ultimately became a redistribution of a good portion of an entire people inside the borders of our own country. at the beginning of the twentieth century 90% of all african americans living in the south. by the end of the great migration in 1970 nearly half were living outside the south, that means the north and west to be there are now, for example, more black people living in the city of chicago than in the entire state of mississippi from which is where most of them came from to begin with. that's astounding. ..

>> broke into southern accents when they all got together. [laughter] they were extremely ambitious and can competitive about ha their children were doing. my mother sent me across town to an integrated school in a cab and told the cab driver, make sure you do not p stop for anyone else, to pick anyone else up. i was 5. you couldn't see me. it looked like an empty cab whenever i was in it. and she head sure to get the number to make sure i was brought home safely. they were extremely competitive. there at the school i befriended other immigrant children, classmates from ecuador, finland, nepal, el salvador in the school that my mother sent me to. the poet natasha looking for a way to describe me or people

like me called me a southerner once removed. i really liked that. [laughter] though i was surrounded by the markers of the great migration, nobody ever talked about it, they never called it that. nobody ever said i came up in the great migration or remember when the great migration started. no one ever talked about it because these individual decisions made by individual people for particular reasons that were special to them but all driven this some ways by the essential caste system that they were all seeking to escape. but there might have been a particular thing that was setting one individual off that was different from another person. so people didn't view themselves as a part of some large event. they viewed themselves as making a decision that was the right thing for them, and that's what's so inspiring to me about the great migration. this is about the power of the individual to change so much, change so much this their own individual life -- in their own individual life and to change so much in the aggregate in the

country as a whole. so you don't necessarily need to be looking to a leader or a savior or a hero. we all have that within ourself which is the beauty of this entire movement. they don't view themselves as part of any great movement. they view themselves as making a decision that was best for themselves and their family, and that's the power of the individual. now, when i began writing this book, i decided that i was not going to write about my own family or any one particular family. and the reason for that was because i wanted to be able to show the breadth and scope of this migration. it was not just one person or one stream, it was multiple streams. three streams, actually, of this great migration. there are people who went up the east coast from georgia, florida, the carolinas and virginia up to washington, philadelphia, new york and boston. that was the east coast stream. there was the middle stream along the country's spine be, along the mississippi which took people from mississippi and

arkansas and also parts of alabama to the midwest, chicago, detroit, cleveland. and then there was the west coast migration which is probably least hone the of them all which is one of the -- least known of them all which is one of the great delights of me being able to work on this book, to explore that, and that was from louisiana and texas to california and the entire west coast. and so these, these -- this migration was not a haphazard unfurling of people just searching for where they might land. it was just as organized and predictable as the fact that if you go to minnesota, you run into a lot of people from scandinavia. now, to find these people i went everywhere i could, everywhere that i could think of where senior citizens whom i thought the south would be. i went everywhere i could think of. i went in new york, chicago and

los angeles to high school reunions, quilting clubs, baptist churches, meetings of retired postal workers, bus drivers, transit workers and retirees. i went to the various state clubs -- yes, there are state clubs -- for all of the southern states. georgia would be represented in cleveland and detroit. quite well. and be in washington d.c. and in chicago there are multiple mississippi clubs. there's a greenville, mississippi, club. greenwood, mississippi, club. there's a grenada, mississippi, club. there are individual clubs for all of the tiny little towns in mississippi represented in chicago. and in los angeles there is, there's a lake charles, louisiana, club; the monroe, louisiana, club; multiple new orleans clubs because it's so

big. there are multiple texas clubs as you can imagine, and even in new york there are churches where everybody is from south carolina. [laughter] i interviewed more than 1200 people. i say i just generally stopped counting after 1200 people. over the 18 months that i took to begin what i call a casting call, a kind of audition for the people who would ultimately be the protagonists in this book. and there are many interesting things that happened along the road to finding the people. i would show up at some of the senior centers and find that many people wanted to talk, lots of people wanted to talk. some people were more interested in the sirloin that was being served at the time. [laughter] therethere were all kinds of ths that i ran into. in one case i remember i would often be part of the program, you know? i'd have to get on the list. there's a lot of organizing and planning that had to go into it

before i could begin speaking to a group of seniors. and and at one senior center in los angeles i was on the program, but i was following someone from the l.a. county extension service. and that person, when he came to speak to the group, i'm anxious at the bit waiting to talk to these people. he made an announcement to all the seniors there. he said, i'm here, i'm passing out these brochures as a warning to you that we are getting reports of unscrupulous people going to seniors and asking them all kinds of questions, personal questions about their lives. [laughter] they're asking where they came from, where they were born, what kind of work did they do, were they retired, how many children did they have -- [laughter] did they own their home, how did they find their home, pretty much all the things i kind of wanted to know. [laughter] and it was after he sat down that it was my turn to go up and speak.

[laughter] and i had to say, basically, i'm here writing a story about -- writing a book, rather, about the great migration. you could see i had to make a transition from being a newspaper reporter to being an author. that's a transition that took many years, you might say, as well. but in any case, i had to make the announcement that i was here writing a book about the great migration and that if if you migrated from louisiana or texas between these years, that you were part of a major moment in the history, and i would like to talk with you about how you got here. and do you know there was not one person who seemed to listen to the man from the l.a. county extension service. i had no trouble at all, thank goodness. [laughter] i got through that one. i settled, ultimately, on three people. three amazing people. characters unto themselves, people who could have been books unto themselves, and they were reported as such which is another reason why the book took so long.

they're amazing characters. one of them, the first, was ida may gladny. she was a sharecropper's wife who was terrible at picking cotton, awful at picking cotton. you don't think about someone being good or bad at it, but she was bad at it. [laughter] she hated it. her family ended up leaving mississippi in in the 1930s when a cousin was theory beaten to death for a theft he did not commit. it was after that that her husband said, this is the last crop we're making. the second person was george starling. he was a college boy who had to leave school when the money ran out because the colored college that he was going to, florida a&m, was hours away from where he lived, and the state schools where he lived in central florida did not admit colored students. so he had to go back to picking oranges and grapefruit like most everyone else in his small town home. he grew incensed at the perils

of the job and the low wages that came. in order to climb into those trees, they often had to splice ladders together and go up 30 or 40 feet into these large trees in order to pluck the fruit from the tree. and they would be paid 10 or 12 cents a box. he was smart enough to be able to read the papers, and he can see -- was there was no hiding. one of the things about the reporting for this book, the research was that it was actually not as difficult to get information about the things i've describedded to you here. described to you here. because the newspapers were very open about it. there was not any embarrassment in the disparities in the way people were treated. there was openness about it. so it was very clear. it was in the papers that these boxes of fruit that were being sold for 10 or 12 cents a box to the pickers were actually going for several dollars a box this open market -- the open market.

so people were very aware of the disparity between what they were getting and the open market. could we get another nickel is really what george starling was saying. so he began organizing the pickers to, to demand higher wages. they would say, well, we're not going to pick it unless you pay us another two cents a box. seemed simple enough. that was not acceptable to the grove owners in florida in the 190s. and so one day a friend came up to him, and he said you have been so, you've been so good to me helping me figure out the numbers because a lot of people couldn't read, and he was one of the few people gone to school. he said, i overheard them talking in the garage the other day about planning something to do to you, that they were going to take you out to black water creek, and that they were going to have a lynching party for you. and so he left florida for harlem in 1945. and the final character or

protagonist but robert per,king foster. he was a surgeon, gambler, loved life. he left monroe, louisiana, in the 1950s because he could practice medicine in the army where he had been a captain but couldn't practice in his own hometown hospital in monroe, louisiana. so he set out on a treacherous journey across the desert by himself to get to california. he was not able to stop past the state of texas as he'd expected he would be able to do, and he had to drive the full length of multiple states without rest because nobody told him that jim crow was not just this south, but was also in the west. it was a journey that i attempted to recreate in order to experience what he experienced. it is all part of the research i did for this book, so you can

begin to see why it took 15 years to get this done. i wanted to know what it was like to drive through the desert without sleep along the same route he had taken, to have your fingers swell up and ache, your eyelids grow heavy from exhaustion in the pitch black of night. my participants rode with me. -- parents rode with me. it was all my father could do to take the wheel from me, but i wouldn't let him because i told him, i must do this myself, i must experience what he did. dr. foster did not have anyone in the car with him, he was driving alone, he didn't have anyone who could have relieved him of the burden of having to drive across the desert by himself. so i was determined to do it. i told my parents up front that i was going to be doing all the driving, and i thought that they'd accepted that. on the hairpin curves, my mother said, you know, he must have been about ready to cry right in here. by the time we got to yuma,

arizona, they ip cysted -- insisted that we stop. they couldn't take it anymore. [laughter] and because there was not -- it was not 1953 anymore and the country has changed so much, we had no trouble finding a place to rest, and it was a fact that actually made it even more difficult, that made it more clear how difficult his journey had been, and it made me appreciate all the more the despair that he must have felt. because he didn't have that choice, as i did then. i want to say a little bit about the effect of the great migration before opening up to questions which you may have. there are many ways to look at the great migration, one of them, though, is that there's so much that they ended up leaving, and there's so much that they took with them. they ended up transplanting southern culture when they left. they took the blues and gospel

and spiritual music with them to the north and created whole new art forms which we now know as rhythm and blues, as jazz, even as hip-hop. there are so many people who are descended from the great migration, the list just goes on and on. but i'll talk a little bit about a few things that absolutely would not exist without the great migration. motown would not exist without the great migration at all. and that is because -- i can't imagine -- you can decide for yourself. berry gordy, the founder of motown, his parents were born and raised in the georgia. they decided to become a part of the great migration and chose to go to detroit where the train route from their part of georgia went. there berry gordy was raised, and he decided as a young man he wanted to go into the music industry. and where did he get the talent for his new, budding business? he chose from -- his talent from

the young people around him who were also children of the great migration. so many of the names that we recognize -- diana ross, aretha franklin, the jackson five, the jackson family as a whole -- all of them were children who were porn in the north to parents -- born in the north to parents who had migrated from the south and, therefore, created the opportunity for a whole new art form and company which has become almost the soundtrack of the 20th century, motown. jazz as we know it, it's almost unfathomable what might have happened had there not been the great migration. miles davis was the child of parents who had come from arkansas, migrated toalton, illinois, and that's where he was raised and game exposed to the music, the metabolism of the north and began practicing and becoming a musician.

thelonious monk, his parents my dated from north carolina to new york when he was 5 years old, and he got opportunities he old not have gotten in the tobacco country of north carolina. and john coltrane left north carolina as well when he was 17, went to philadelphia where he got his first alto sax. what would have happened if he had never gotten an alto sax in philadelphia? hard to imagine. and the three of them often got together and created, i mean, these are the great legends of jazz. what would have happened without that? it's hard to fathom what would have happened. they carried with them the folkways, the language, the music and food of their southern roots and recreated these enclaves that i've described to you. working on this book, i interviewed people with collard greens growing this their backyards in oakland. oakland, california. [laughter] i mean, this is how far the transplantation occurred.

i want to, i think, close with two things. one is what is it that they left? the enormity of the departure is hard to fathom on so many levels. it was spiritual, it was emotional, it was familial, it was gee photographical -- geographical. in every way it was a departure that took bravery. these were people who were leaving a place maybe to never see it again, maybe never being able to sit at the kitchen table and have a cup of coffee with your mother as you might have before because it was so much more difficult then to even get back and forth. and i'm haunted by a story that my mother has told me about one of the things that she never saw or experienced again after she left. and that was about my grandmother. my grandmother, again, as i said, was this master gardener

although she was not called that. she lived for her garden. she grew everything, things that were so difficult to grow even african violets which i understand are difficult. i grow things that will grow in the georgia soil, and they're very happy, but i have never tried what she tried. one of the things she grew was this plant called the night-looming sirius. how many of you have heard of of that? is it not just the most gangly, saddest orphan of a plant? [laughter] i mean, i've seen pictures. what is the point? [laughter] well, the point is that on a single night usually in the summer, it has snakelike branches and it coils. so anyway, on a particular height in the middle of the night when no one would see it, it unfurls its petals and is a

beautiful lily-like plant. you must be awake at two in the morning on the day it decides to bloom in order to see it. and, apparently, my grandmother lived for that moment. so she watched this night-blooming sirius closely, and when she knew it was time for it to bloom, she would tell everyone up and down the street, you should come over tonight. [laughter] and so ms. amanda poindexter and all these women, mrs. jacobs, all came to the house on giltens street about midnight in order to watch thing or wait for this thing to unopen, to open up. my mother said that she would have the -- that was the day she could stay up late. her mother let her stay up late, and they stood out on the porch with their sweet tea and homemade ice cream and sat and waited for this thing to bloom. hours go by and, finally, it would begin to unfurl.

it was said that if you looked closely enough, you could see the face of the baby jesus in the blooms, which is what they were all looking for. all of the women would always say, i see the face of the baby jesus in the blooms. [laughter] my mother said she never saw it. no matter what, she never saw it. she's always been one of those honest people on the planet, and she admits that she never saw it. but she also never experienced it again after she left, and she made the ultimate sacrifice, ultimately not just for herself, but for me. and for that i'm intensely grateful as her daughter. the title of the book, "the warmth of other suns," comes from a little-known passage that i discovered. there was a point where i was reading one book a day, and one of the books i had to read was the autobiography, essentially, of richard wright, one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, and his autobiography was called originally "american

hunger," but then "black boy." and in the footnotes of the durant version is what -- current version is what has become the end graph of the book, and i'm going to read that to you. i was leaving the south to fling myself into the unknown. i was taking a part of the south to transplant in alien soil to see if it could grow differently, if it could drink of think and cool rains, bend in strange winds, respond to the warmth of other suns and, perhaps, to bloom. to me, it's not just beautiful, but it's a message about transformation on any level that a person might have inside of them. whatever you might want to be, whatever you might want to do, there's a message in that for all of us. but, ultimately, it's an indication of what they were all hoping for when they left, and it turns out that when they left

the south, the south never really, truly left them. they created communities of like-minded people from back in the old country from which they came. they made the same turnip greens and sweet potato pie. i grew up with all of that with my mother. the south never left them. so i have come to the conclusion that there really are no other suns. the sun is within you. you are the sun. and you find or make your happiness wherever you decide to plant yourself. thank you for listening, and i hope you enjoy the book. [applause]

[applause] >> if you have questions, please come to the microphones in the aisle here. >> when you began this beautiful journey that became the wonderful book, were you aware that it would be 15 years, and was there any point at which you said, i'm giving up or was, you know, the zeal kind of left you? >> i have to say there were very many difficult moments, particularly when the people that i was writing about got sick. and when i would arrive to los angeles and instead of going to the home of dr. foster which i so looed, i had -- loves, i had to go to the hospital. those were the most difficult moments, of course, because i had grown to have such affection for them and they for me. but, you know, i'm one of these people who just never gives up, and once i was into it, i wasn't going to let it go.

if someone had told me it'd take 15 years, this wouldn't exist. i mean, really. i would never -- i'm glad i didn't know. >> thank you so much for persevering. >> thank you. >> hi. i have a quick question. one, i just started reading your book today, and it's an amazing -- i already love it and i'm looking forward to using it in my own classes at spelman. but i have a question about the people who remained behind, if you got any insight into be what motivated people who decided to stay in the south while so many people were leaving to go to other places. >> well, i think that there's a spirit of add vebture -- adventure, and there's something about the immigrant spirit of the migrant heart. that a lot of the people -- one of the things that runs true for a lot of the people that i interviewed for this book who did leave was that they felt for

whatever reason that they would die if they stayed. if an interesting -- i would not have lived if i said. you can say it in a spiritual way or in a factual way where someone's actually leaving, you know, on the heels of a threat of death. there was something that was happening to their spirit that would not allow them to stay. there's someone in the book, of course, one of the most well known people in the book was actually the president, the former, the longtime president of atlanta university. and he was, it was rufus clement. and he decided to stay because he actually believed, there was a belief and an important one that there needed to be people here to stay to retain the culture that had been built over the decades by, over the centuries by the people who had been here. someone even said, one of the chapters it says someone needs to stay here so you have a place to come back to when you need to. and that's a beautiful thought. >> hello. >> hello.

>> your book, i heard your interview with valerie jackson, and while you were speaking thoughts just rang through my head. i'm a music educator and working on some projects looking at american history through the eyes of creative artists. and that idea came from the research that i did for my doctoral work on robert owens, expatriate composer from texas. and when i saw, i began to study the migration from texas, his parents took him to berkeley, california. >> uh-huh. >> totally different mindset. he was a child prodigist, and the opportunities that were afforded to him in california were interesting. but that's another story. [laughter] both my parents are from he's, my dad from jackson, my mother from holly springs. and they met in chicago --

>> well, where would you be? >> yes. [laughter] yes. and i always wondered, my mother wherever she lived after -- well, she would always ask the owners of the building in her apartment if she could have a plot of land to plant her collard greens, her turnip greens and her onions until the day she died. she always had a plot of land to carry, to bring mississippi to there. and the third thing is thank you for your document. >> thank you. [applause] >> it's a brilliant book. i finished it. i couldn't put it down. >> you finished it? [laughter] it's only been out three days. >> i couldn't stop reading it. some of the first part of it has some of the most gut-wrenching, unbelievable episodes.

and, frankly, if you didn't have the credentials that you have, i would find them really hard to believe. how much of that did you, were you aware of given your protected upbringing before you started the book, and did that have any influence on your writing, desire to write the book before you started concern. >> i really appreciate your asking that question because in order to recreate what it was like to live in that era, i had to read, as i told you, a book a day. and some of it was really hard reading. very difficult reading. a lot of it had, i mean, there was a period, there was like a lynching period in which i had to read about the lynchings, and it made me not very popular at dinner parties, as you might imagine. [laughter] they'd say, well, how was your day? and i'm ready to tell them stories that were not very easy to tell, obviously, very difficult. i think that the answer to your question is that it's necessary to understand the context, and it is our history.

it is american history. it's not the southern history, this is the united states of america. and this is american history, and we must all deal with it. also, as you know, there were not pleasant things that were going on this the north as well. you finished it, so you know that there were some difficult outbursts that occurred in the north as well. so it's -- this is not to point if fingers at the south. no part of the country really can point at any other part of the country if that gets to your, to answer your question. i want to make sure i'm answering it. >> how much of that did you know before you started? >> oh. i didn't know my of this. >> okay. thank you. >> this was all coming from the reading. and as i was saying before, this was not hidden history. this was, this was covered in every major -- these things were covered in every major newspaper. claude neil is probably what you're talking about, that was one of the worst lynchings and

the worse atrocities i had ever heard of in my entire life. it's not easy reading. but it is something that every american should know about was it happened -- because it happened in the borders of this country, it happened in florida. and just to give people a sense of it, it was a lynching, but it was the way the lynching happened. i'm not going to go into the details of the physical part of it, but the fact is that the posse was so determined to find this man that the authorities found it impossible to keep him protected from the posse. they had to, they had to transport him from pensacola to -- all over the panhandle. and be every time they got -- every time they got him to a jail, the posse was right on their tail, so they eventually had to take him to alabama, across state lines, and it was there that they actually came and got him. and, you know, it's a sad moment in american history. but i knew, i had never heard of

him before, and it's my belief that all americans, we need to confront the good and the bad of what's happened within our borders. >> absolutely. >> and i did not know anything about that. >> i grew up here, and i didn't know. a lot of that. so thank you. >> thank you. >> i remember reading sometime ago that a chicagoing defender was instrumental in migration. did you find anything on that? >> oh, absolutely. the chicago defender was one of the first to document, the first record is in the defender from 1916 in which it's referring to a small party of african-americans who left selma saying it's not worth staying anymore, essentially. it was just a paragraph. and so that was the frst

documented indication that there was a migration afoot. they were instrumental in that they brought news from the north that gave hope to people who were here in an untenable situation, and it was, it was almost contraband because it was not really legal to even have the chicago defender or. very threatening, of course, to the caste system here in the south to have workers, important, you know, the bedrock of the economic system being lured away to the north. you should know, also, that there were tremendous efforts to keep black people from leaving the south lahrly in the early -- particularly in the early years of the migration. trains would be stopped. if there were black people onboard, they were pulled off the train accused of vagrancy, accused of having some unsettled debt. some trains where there were many people waiting to board on the platform, the train was

waved through. people were prevented to buy tickets in order to leave, and there were great earths on the north to -- efforts on the north to try to recruit this cheap labor. as you think of it, the south in that time period was in some way withs like an undeveloped -- some ways like an undeveloped country, so there was all this cheap labor that could be exploited. they centre cuters down. -- recruiters down. they were recruited north to the pennsylvania railroad, to pittsburgh, to chicago. and when the north got wind of that, they began exacting extreme measures. one of them was in macon, georgia, they charged $25,000 for a licensing fee in order to recruit black people to the north. now, how many people in 1918 were going to pay -- who would do it now, mush less then? [laughter] so you can imagine how that would have been a dampening, have a dampening effect on the

recruitment. and if people were caught, they would be charged -- they were facing one year of hard labor. not pleasant in many southern prisons at that time. so there were many things that would keep people from leaving which were, which were implemented by the south. >> i would like to hear your reflections or thoughts on highway 61, if there's any one road or highway that's associated with the migration in blues folklore, legend and all that is highway 61. now, obviously, the migrants to california and washington didn't use that highway, and i haven't read your book yet, so if you have -- if you treat it extensively, i apologize. but i'd like to hear your reflection or thoughts on what seems to be the most important route north at least from mississippi/alabama. >> i actually took highway 61 on a trip back to the south, back to mississippi with one of the characters, one of the protagonists in the book, ida

may, who was from mississippi. she was not from the delta which is where the highway 61 goes, but she was from the hill country which is one reason i wanted to talk -- write about that part of the state, because it doesn't get as much attention. this, actually, is a little bowl of cotton that we picked. this is what i picked with her in 1998. i keep it for good luck and to remind me of her. what happened was we were, we were driving back to where she was from, chickasaw county, mississippi. and it was during the time period that she left, i wanted to recreate -- i want today go back at the exact same time she left mississippi, and it was cotton-picking season. they left towards the end of it after they'd cleared the land. and we stopped. we were driving through, and she saw this cotton growing in the field that was unpicked, and she said, let's stop the car and pick some. [laughter] and i said -- i called her mother gladney, i said, are you

sure it's okay? this cotton belongs to somebody. she said, oh, they're not going to care what little bit we're going to pick. so she jumped out of the car and started picking. she hated picking but for some reason because she didn't have to pick, she couldn't stop picking at that point. [laughter] so we picked all this cotton and came back with bouquets of cotton. they're actually quite beautiful if you don't actually have to to pick it. this is a little ball left over from it. but to get to highway 61, obviously, that's the a legendary road that has a great meaning. it's very different now from what it was at the time. it now has, you know, catfish farms and a lot of the, the gambling casinos are now up and down there, so it's changed quite a bit. it's also become a little bit more commercial in some ways, a lot of efforts to capitalize on the blues history there. one of the goals of the book, though, was to kind of expand the view of the migration beyond

that mississippi delta to south side of chicago view. because it was so much bigger than that. and i wanted to be able to show ha that's a part of it -- that that's a part of it, but it was an outward movement to all over the country. and it changed the entire country. and i wanted to, i wanted the great migration to take it rightful place in history as a major watershed in american history. and so that was one of the goals of the book. which one -- >> yes. thank you so much for your presentation tonight. it was just powerful. >> thank you. >> question, do you address in the book that class distinction or kind of a -- yeah, it's the classism that emerges from the migrant generation, and a kind of were the than the ones -- better than the ones we left behind.

>> hmm. >> the country urban. >> that's a -- i can hear the murmuring. that's a very good question. what is she going to say to that? [laughter] you know, i think, you know, i start the book by saying at the beginning of this migration every african-american had a decision to make. every african-american had a decision to make. and they had to think about all of the factors that they were facing. and what they needed to do for their particular situation. whether they were going to leave or whether they were going to stay. it is my belief that it was imperative that there be people to stay and people to go. and it's that opportunity that was there always off in the sunset, in the north and the west for the people who stayed that i think helped give them a kind of safety valve, a kind of leverage as they forth to fight for civil rights and face those

hoses. somebody needed to be here to fight that final battle, so i think no one can say who is better and who is worse. each played a role. the people in the north provided, you know, the money. they were making more money, so they could send money back to help sport the effort down -- support the effort down here. they were praying for them, they would often them haven if they needed to. if people thesed o get away, they could get away. there was a place to go now that there wasn't before, before the migration occurred. so there was a role for both sides in this situation, north and south. i don't think that there's room for anyone to say one is better than the other. that's my opinion. >> yeah. i'm not -- what i'm dealing with is being a product of that migrant generation, as you talked about, where the parents come out of the clients, south carolina, north carolina, meet in washington d.c. >> oh, you did ha too? [laughter] >> daddy hoboed on the train to

concern. >> i get to that too. >> to keep from getting killed by whites who would shoot at you. >> yep. >> and then went into world war ii and came back and started a family life. but the issue is i can remember vividly this nasty stereotyping that went on in the children, the bamers, you know, the ones who'd just come up from the south. they're the bama kids. they're the kids who are ignorant and backward. that was a painful kind of existence. it might have mellowed some as the generations went on, but in the earlier generations that was some vicious, nasty kind of culture that was created. and a lot of people couldn't overcome that. it, it, you know -- >> i see what you're saying. what -- it's very human to have,

once people have made that journey and gotten is -- gotten situated in a new place to actually want to close the door, for one thing. >> of course, yes. yes. >> each wave of migrants had to face that. >> are yes. >> every wave had to face that until they could become citified and seasoned into the new world that they were in. >> exactly. >> you know, the urban league used to pass out little flyers to tell people don't wear your head rags outside, don't hang your laundry out in the front, put shoes on your children. [laughter] i mean, there were all kinds of things that they were being told to help adjust to life in the knot because ambitious and -- north because ambitious and fearless as they might have been, they still didn't know quite yet the rules of the new place they were in. then once they learned the rules -- it was almost like hazing. once you get in the fraternity, then you want to make sure anybody new has gone through the same paces as you.

i think it's very human. >> now, what has happened to our children and grandchildren now who have just rebelled against -- >> i think that it's part of the immigrant culture, mindset, heart. now, of course, african-americans were not immigrants because they were citizens, and we should not have had to leave one part of the country in order to experience the rights and privileges that they were worn into. but just simply were not recognized because of where they were living. what happens with immigrants, and there are other groups of immigrant groups that have experienced this as well. i mean, many in boston there are younger generations of irish that have not made that full immersion into, into -- they've gotten involved in gangs and drugs, some other groups -- italians, mexicans. what happens is that, the succeeding generation does not have within them the sense of sacrifice and the sense of want and the sense of the old world

values that propelled that first generation to leave in the first place. and i hi that what is, to me from what i've done in this research, what often is missing is how do you translate that, how do you transfer those old world values that had meaning, the beautiful hard work ethic of the south, the spiritual grounding of the south, the faith of people in the south, the willingness to sacrifice and defer gratification although the migrants didn't get credit for that. one thing about this my grant generation is there are so many myths and misconceptions about them that were totally untrue. that's one of the things i learned in this process. those people who migrated from the south actually were more likely to be married than those who were up in the north already. that's astounding to me. that's not at all what you here. they were more likely to be raising their children in two-parent households. you never hear that. they were more likely to be

having -- to be working than not working. they were less likely to be on welfare. they were more likely to be making more money than the people who were in the north already, and do you know why they were making more money? it's not because they were actually making more income. they were working longer hours or multiple jobs just like most immigrant groups do. there's something -- well, what this is all about is what it means, what do human beings do when they're in certain situations? it's not about black and white, it's about what do human beings do when they're in a particular situation, and they want to make life better for themselves. and that first generation and that second generation of people in the new world regardless of whether they're italian, irish, german, it does not matter, african-american, they are going to do whatever it takes to succeed. they cannot fail. failure is not an option because they cannot go home and have people saying, see, i told you it wasn't going to work. [laughter] i knew they weren't going to make it up in new york.

[laughter] yes. >> hi, good evening. my name is deb by brown, and i'm originally from south carolina. i've been living this georgia for 25 years. i'm an origin south carolinian as i've traced my family roots back to 1875. so my south carolina roots run very deep. as a matter of fact, my family history was chronicled in the movie with deliberate speed with sidney poitier which is thurgood marshall's first case in south carolina which was briggs v. or elliott. all those members are, like my family, members. >> congratulations. >> it was rolled up into brown v. board of education in topeka, kansas. although i'm from south carolina and educated in the virginia, i stayed in the south as many of my relatives did because a lot

of them worked for the railroad which was a pretty good job during that time, and there was to reason to leave the south. but a number of them did take the same route your mother took on the silver comet that took you to philadelphia, new york, boston, connecticut and those areas. and speaking with the, i guess, the original migrants to the north and west and, well, north and the west, did you find that a lot of their children and grandchildren are doing a reverse my duration? because what you're seeing in atlanta itself a lot of those people are coming back and rediscovering their southern roots. any comment on that? >> yes. in fact, i think that there are many reasons why. one reason is that african-americans actually are, as americans, doing what many other people are doing. there is, there's a movement toward the sun belt because particularly in the '90s that was where the economy was going so much stronger, so that reflects that as well.

but the second thing is one thing about that generation is that they didn't really talk that much about what they'd experience. and i think the younger generation, the succeeding generations after the migration, the children of the migration had questions. they didn't have that same personal, the personal memories that might have been so painful that the parents might have had. they were more willing to take a chance in coming back. it was a new place. it was the warmer sun, you might say. and so there was not that same resistance to coming back and seeing it. my own parents, for example, my mother may not like me saying this, but they came back kicking and screaming basically. i mean, they basically were not excited about coming back to the south. and, ultimately, they ended up enjoying it and loving the opportunities and the fact that it had changed. but the younger generation is much more open to the ideas of that. and i think that's reflective of how much the south has changed,

how much the country has changed. and in some ways it might be argued that that's one of the great legacies of the great migration. those people leaving helped force the south to change. they were voting with their feet. and now it's so much a better place for all of us to live. >> two more. >> two more? okay, yes. >> just in thinking about the length of time it took you to come to this final product and your previous successes, i just wondered what you found to be inspiring or motivational for you or who encouraged you during the times when, i'm sure, kind of there were lows and you weren't sure if you wanted to continue doing it or what have you. >> thank you for asking that question. i think the greatest inspiration was the people themself. these, the three people that i focused on and the 1200 or more that i also talk with willingly shared their stories with me. they wanted their stories told.

they wanted people to know what they'd experienced, and many of them would -- i remember in oakland one particular visit i had where the people, where a man actually came up with papers to show what he had experienced. and he had tears in his eyes. and so people wanted their stories told. and when i had moments of wondering whether i'd be able to make it through to the end, i felt i had to finish it for them because they had entrusted their stories to me. one of them said, you know, if you don't finish this book in time, i'm going to be proofreading from heaven. [laughter] and he was right. yeah, he was right, unfortunately. so that was what -- the ultimate inspiration was the people really. thank you for asking. >> good afternoon. my name is fleda mask jackson, and my question is what about the land?

you talked about gardening as a, really a real essential element in terms of the southern experience that was taken to the north. but i want to know did people talk about from the southern side landownership and those who migrated, the loss of land so that land becomes a real central feature of this movement back and forth, maintaining it or losing it, giving it up, the whole discussion around land and land ownership. >> land is fascinating because, first of all, the land is so beautiful to begin with, the south. and secondly, there has been, it's such a difficult relationship between the land and the people anyway. you work the land, you knew the land but you didn't own the land in many cases. in other cases you could own the land, but it could be taken from you. as it happens, in my own family

both the homes that both my mother and father lived in were razeed to make room for highways. that's another way that the land is taken from people. so you're right, the land becomes in some ways representative of the only thing that african-americans might have had to connect them to something that had meaning and value. and then that was taken as well. but for the people that i ended up talking to, they had to leave all of that in order to go to the north and start all over again, start from scratch, start from nothing. and to me the lesson of that is a spiritual one. again, getting to the idea that the sun is within all of us, the land is within all of us. and we take that with us wherever we go. and that's sort of what i take from the meaning of the title and the land that you speak of. it is our land. but it is, it is not us.

you know, the people in the families, the families and what make us our, make us who we are is beyond the land. so i found that they were willing to look past all of that, and i took a lesson from that, a spiritual one. and i think that that's a useful one for us all. it doesn't mean it's not important, it just means what can you do if it's been razeed? we went back trying to find my mother's home, and it was gone. there were no touch points for it. so we had to let that go and recognize we had to be grateful for what we had and accept the blessings that we had been given. so thank you. [applause] >> this event was hosted by the atlanta history center. for more information, visit atlantahistorycenter.com. >> up next, thomas gaigen says that americans would be better

with off if we adopted the model of european socialism currently in place in germany and france. he presents his argument with senior editor and staff writer at a magazine. this program is just over an hour. [applause] >> thank you. thank you, everybody, for coming. i hope you can all hear us. i know some of you can't see us, but rest assured we are here. i'm going to say a little wit more -- little bit more about tom. he's from the heartland, i'm from the coast. he was worn in since natty -- born in cincinnati, went to st. xavier high school in cincinnati. like me, did some time in the carter administration, and he's not just a lawyer in private practice. his firm, founded by leon dupree

who's a great, legendary reformer, political figure, labor lawyer in chicago who died last year at the age of 101, he was tom's mentor. now that firm, now that firm is called dupree, schwartz and gee began and when rahm emanuel gets to be mayor of chicago, he better look over his shoulder because tom may be with coming after him. most of us know him as a writer and a wonderful, wonderful writer he is. back when i was editor of "the new republic," the high point of my month or year was when a new tom geoghegan piece came through, and we could clear the cover to feature it. his books should be read for pleasure as well as enlightenment. they're like stories. there's a character in them very much like tom who tells a story.

that character's a little more hapless than the real tom, i think. and this one, "were you born on the wrong continent?" turns out to be extremely timely because back when, back when during the cold war when communism was the enemy and can the social democracies of continental europe were mostly members of nato and our allies, the american right tended to overlook their heresies. they didn't stress the fact that these were european socialists. but once communism collapsed and went away, thanks in large part to the efforts of social democrats in europe among others, now the new enemy here in our politics is socialism.

even democratic socialism. social democracy. you see the signs of the tea parties that say, it's a sign that says -- it has a picture of hitler, lenin and obama. hitler; national socialism, hitler markist socialism. obama, lenin socialism. if only. [laughter] so, tom, why is european socialism a menace to america? >> i think european socialism is the way out of our problems. and i wrote this book in despair because i thought at the time european socialism, social democracy was about to vanish from the earth. that the u.s. model was supreme. larry summers was going over to davos to pump it up, and so a lot of this book is starting out in the 1990s and trying to explain why i thought this was

the fair system and, in the long run, the only kind of system that could work. the germans were good at holding on to their manufacturing base, bringing in workers, putting them on the coronet boards. this -- corporate boards. this had to work in the long run. it turns out this book is a little prescient. our shareholder model turns out not to be very responsible be even as shareholders, and there seem to be two models in the world now. one is this authoritarian corporate model in china, authoritarian capitalism, and stakeholder capitalism, call it european socialism or whatever you will, in europe. our version doesn't work. and be i wrote this book because i feel that in a world where we're facing this choice now after the cold war between an authoritarian capitalism a la china and some other parts of east asia and democratic capitalism or shareholder capitalism, this is the system. we've got a lot to learn from the germans, so that's why i wrote this book.

kind of. >> yeah, but aren't they going down the tubes over there? isn't everything falling apart? i mean, they never do any work. >> yes. [laughter] the great thing about germany which i, you know, i have a couple of basic facts that i use to explain this interest of mine in germany of all places, the most boring part of europe. they're tied for number one or they have been number one in export sales abroad since 2003, tied even with china. only 82 million people, and while chinese and americans work until they drop and americans get less and less out of it, you know, the germans have seven weeks vacation, all this time off. it's like they're doing it with one hand tied behind their back. so we have to figure out the secret of taking more out of the global economy than the global economy is taking out of us and doing it without working so darn hard. and that's what i, is the other reason that i think this german model is